We Are Not Free

by Traci Chee

  ANZIO

  JUNE 7

  We get our first taste of war when the Germans decide to raid the supply dumps at Anzio, and me and my pal Kaz Okuda run to watch. Kaz’s a funny guy. He kinda reminds me of Frankie, who’s in Item Company, 3rd Battalion, so I don’t see him much, but more than I see Mas, who’s all the way over in 2nd Battalion, but smaller and wiry like a fighting weasel or something.

  When we met, he told me, “No offense, but you better be in another company because I sure as hell don’t want a guy named Twitchy covering my ass.” Turns out we’re both in the same platoon in King Company, and the first time we get to handle live grenades, Kaz fumbles his. Lucky for him, I snatch that thing right up and toss it before our platoon sergeant’s any the wiser. Kaz liked me fine after that.

  Now German planes are roaring through the sky, red tracer fire streaking through the darkness. Flames explode over the supply dumps. On the ground, the antiaircraft guns are flashing, flak bursts rat-a-tat-tatting through the air.

  “It’s like the Fourth of July!” Kaz shouts. His eyes are lit up like he’s a kid seeing firecrackers for the first time.

  “Except they’re a month too early!” I say.

  He laughs. Kaz has got this big laugh, all teeth and gullet. “Someone’s gotta teach those Germans some goddamn U.S. history!”

  BELVEDERE

  JUNE 26

  You can say a lotta things about me, but you can’t say I don’t admit it when I’m wrong.

  And boy, am I wrong.

  I didn’t know what I was here for, and that raid at Anzio wasn’t war.

  No matter how much you march or how many targets you shoot or how many maneuvers you do, you can’t really imagine it till you’re in it. Till you’ve got orders to take some city in the middle of Tuscany you’ve never heard of and your buddy Bill hasn’t either, and that’s saying something ’cause Bill’s gotta be the smartest guy in all of King Company, and you’re charging up the road and your ears are ringing with the sound of artillery fire you can’t identify yet and your weapon’s slippery in your hands and you’re running with the rest of your squad or who you hope is the rest of your squad—you can’t tell ’cause it’s so fucking chaotic—and you reach a shed or something and you look around for the guy next to you and suddenly the guy next to you isn’t there, he’s on the ground in that field you just crossed and there’s a hole in his helmet where an MG got him and he’s dead, shit you’ve never seen a dead guy before, but there he is.

  Bill runs up and he’s got this panicked look in his eyes and he’s yelling, “That’s Ted Araki! He’s dead, Twitch!” and you’re screaming, “I know! I know! I saw!” Actually, you can’t stop seeing it, even when you’re not looking, and your sergeant’s grabbing you by the jacket now, he’s pulling you forward, shouting, “Keep moving! Get going!” and you want to obey ’cause you know you’re supposed to obey but goddamn, Ted Araki is dead and you don’t wanna fucking die, you wanna hunker down somewhere safe and quiet, except the last time you felt safe and quiet was in the arms of a girl in a desert and now she and the desert are half a world away and they’re shooting at you, those bullets are real, those guys are really falling, dying, and holy shit, I mean holy motherfucking shit, this is really it, this is war.

  3rd Battalion, that’s Item, Jig, and King Companies, makes it fifteen hundred yards or something before we’re held up south of our objective. It’s not even noon, and we’re stuck. There’s those big explosions our sergeant says are from German 88s and some automatic fire coming straight at us from Belvedere every time we show our faces.

  Me and my buddy Bill are next to each other in the shelter of a road embankment, and he keeps taking off his glasses and cleaning ’em and putting ’em back on only to take ’em off again.

  I lean back. “Shit, Bill, I didn’t come all the way to Europe to sit in some ditch. When do we get a move on?”

  Then they call the 100th Battalion outta reserve. Yeah, the same 100th that’s made of Hawaiians who joined up after Pearl Harbor and replacements we sent from Shelby. The 100th that’s been fighting in Italy for nine months. The 100th that almost took Monte Cassino with the 34th Division. The 100th they call the Purple Heart Battalion ’cause they’ve had so many guys wounded or KIA.

  These guys are veterans now and goddamn heroes ’cause they go charging right up the middle between 2nd Battalion and us in 3rd, take the high ground, Belvedere, and another nearby village. I mean, you think you know something, and then some guys come along and show you that you know nothing and you’d better shut up, watch, and learn fast.

  By the time 1700 hours rolls around, we’re advancing again, driving the Germans right into the sweet embrace of the 100th. It feels different this time, knowing that the gunfire’s gonna be all around us, knowing that after the 100th’s lightning strike on Belvedere, we can’t let them show us up, knowing that this is what we came here to do, this is really it, and we can’t choke now.

  MONTEVERDI

  JUNE 30

  After three days of fighting around Belvedere, they pull us back to Monteverdi. It’s a pretty little hilltop town of red shingle roofs, green shutters, and stone the color of orange sherbet. Best of all, on the second day, me and Kaz are poking around, looking into storage sheds for eggs or some of that good Parmesan Mrs. K. likes to use on Italian night at the Katsumoto house, and Kaz is scuffling around, griping about something or another, when he knocks over a sack of grain. The thing hits the floor, whump!, and the burlap splits, spilling seeds like a little waterfall.

  Kaz curses and kneels to scoop it back into the bag, but he stops. The grain’s going right through the floorboards, and in the silence you can hear it falling, sssssss, down a long ways.

  Quickly, we move some barrels around and pull up a trapdoor like the one my dad uses in Topaz to hide his sake still, and we look down this hole with a ladder leading into cobwebby darkness.

  Kaz whistles. “Think it’s a crypt or something?” he asks.

  It isn’t.

  It’s wine. Barrels and barrels of the stuff. Must be ten thousand gallons at least, all holed up below this old storage shed. Some of it’s bottled, and Kaz is quick to taste it. “Gotta see if it’s poisoned, am I right, Twitch?” He takes a big gulp, and his eyes go real bright. “Hell, if that’s poisoned, I’m gonna die happy!”

  Except we don’t get a chance to enjoy it. Half an hour later, we’re ordered out of Monteverdi and on to Bibbona, and I swear to God, Kaz couldn’t’ve been sadder if he’d gotten a Dear John letter from his sweetheart back in Minidoka.

  “All that wine!” he moans as we load into the trucks.

  “Yeah,” I say. “It’s a crying shame.”

  “Don’t gimme that,” he says. “You didn’t taste it. You don’t know what you’re missing.”

  “I’m not missing anything.” With a grin, I flip open the top of my pack. Inside, I’ve got four bottles of wine for our squad.

  He lets out a whoop that echoes off the Monteverdi walls. “Twitchy Hashimoto, you sly son of a gun!”

  HILL 140

  JULY 6

  Guys who were injured at Belvedere start going AWOL from the hospitals and the aid stations, trying to get back to the line. They reappear at the company command post, grinning like nothing happened, maybe they’ve got a limp or something, but they say as long as they’ve got a working trigger finger, they wanna keep fighting. I mean, can you believe that? White boys go AWOL ’cause they’re scared. Nisei boys go AWOL ’cause they wanna keep fighting.

  You know what’s funny? If a white guy abandons his post, he’s a coward. It’s a shame. But he’s just one guy. But if a Nisei did that? Hell, it wouldn’t just reflect on him, would it? Nah, we’d all be cowards.

  I think that’s why the 100th tackled Monte Cassino so many times last winter, even though it was hopeless. That’s why they struck so hard that first day in Belvedere, doing in one afternoon a job that everyone else thought would take days.

  Mas s
ays it best, I think: We gotta be better. We gotta fight harder. We gotta be twice as perfect so they can’t overlook us.

  And we are. Fucking perfect.

  We’re on the western slopes of Hill 140, this ridge so long that in the distance you can see all the way down to the ocean, and the going’s hard. The whole hillside’s riddled with caves, and it seems like the Germans are holed up in every one of ’em, but we’re protecting 2nd Battalion’s left flank, and if they’ve got any hope of reaching the summit, we gotta be there for ’em.

  We’re under cover in this dry creek, but at any second the Germans could come striking at us from above, and our sergeant, Toshi Tamura, he peers over the lip of the wash. Sprat-a-tat-tat! Some machine-gun nest to our left goes after him. He ducks back down and he grabs his Thompson. “Cover me!” he says.

  Then he runs out.

  “What the hell!” Bill says. We’re laying down covering fire, bang bang bang bang, shells flying. Sgt. Tamura is running across the slope, his Tommy gun chattering, Germans firing on him left and right, but he takes out the machine-gun nest. Lots of blood. Germans falling. He turns, fires again, takes out another bunch of guys we didn’t even know were on our right.

  “Holy shit!” I say. “Are you seeing this?”

  The sarge is outta ammo now, so he tosses his Thompson, grabs a potato masher, you know, a German grenade, and chucks it into one of those goddamn caves. The machine gun’s after him while the other Germans try to get his grenade out of their nest. Dirt’s spraying up at his heels. He skids in the dust.

  I’m screaming, “Get outta there, Sarge!”

  Then boom! The cave explodes. He hardly stops. He gets right back up, and he’s motioning us all outta the wash. “Get moving, boys! We got a hill to climb!”

  And I look at Bill, and Bill looks at me, and we grin at each other and grab our guns and go charging out, out and forward, up the hill.

  LUCIANA

  JULY 16–17

  Day one in Luciana, and we already know it’s a different kinda fighting here.

  Luciana’s a small village, barely even a village, a dozen buildings, maybe, a couple blocks, it’s even smaller than Japantown back home. But you take Luciana, and you’ve got the high ground on the port city of Livorno, which they call Leghorn but I like the rolling sounds of the Italian, Lee-vorrrr-no, and everybody knows that. Us and the Germans both.

  So they don’t give it up easy.

  First thing, we’re met with a barrage. They throw everything at us. Tanks. Artillery. Automatic weapons. Our first command post is a little house on the edge of town, and it’s shelled so hard, we have to abandon it. Seconds later, the thing is totaled. Direct hit.

  In the fighting, we lose most of our officers, including our company CO.

  But we keep going. Our radioman’s calling in enemy positions in Japanese and the 522nd Field Artillery is delivering, boom! boom! boom! A tank, gone. A machine-gun nest in a second-story window, destroyed. Our bazooka guys are blasting through walls and shop windows. Mortars are falling on the rooftops, in the streets.

  * * *

  That night, you hear patrols skirmishing in the darkness. The quick fire of machine pistols, Tommy guns. The guys on guard duty with you jumping at shadows. The guys who were sleeping or who were trying to sleep starting out of their dreams and grabbing for their rifles.

  * * *

  Day two’s worse, if you can believe it. We’re going house to house, room to room, smashing windows, throwing grenades. We kick open doors. We storm up creaking staircases. A guy at the window with a rifle. Pop! Pop! He gets two rounds in the chest and then I’m gone again, down the creaking steps, past the blown-out parlor and the dead bodies on the floor.

  Every street crossing is a hazard, every street corner is a deathtrap. They’ve got snipers in every window, MGs—you know, machine guns—on every floor. Our squad has gotta cross this intersection, but we’re too spread out. An MG’s got some guys held up behind a pile of stones and warped iron from a collapsed balcony. Me and Bill are pinned in a doorway. The rest of our squad is somewhere farther down the street, trying to get to us, but if we don’t hurry up, the Germans are gonna call in our position, and I don’t wanna be around when the mortars start falling.

  Me and Bill peep around the doorframe. There’s a flash from across the intersection, and we duck back as a bullet chips the wall where my head just was.

  “You see where it came from?” I glance at Bill.

  He clutches his rifle. “Don’t do nothing stupid, Twitch.”

  I laugh. “Don’t you know me by now?” And I dash out the doorway, into the street. Bullets ping against the stones behind me. I can almost feel them, they’re so hot, and I think I could die, I could die right now, but I’m not afraid. I’ve got Bill backing me up.

  There’s a bang of Bill’s M1 as I hurl myself against the wall on the other side of the road. The sniper fire stops. But I don’t. I’m in the MG’s line of fire now, and I’m scrambling for the nearest cover and I’m really scared this time, fingers digging at the cobblestones, trying to run faster, go faster, except you can’t outrun a bullet.

  But good old Bill’s still watching out for me. While the Germans are shooting, he pulls the pin on one of his grenades and runs right up to that machine-gun nest. He flings a grenade through the window, but not before one of them gets him. Crack! He goes down. The walls explode outward.

  “Bill!” I run for him.

  The guys are all around me. They’re shooting out windows as I drag Bill outta the line of fire, but my hands are slick. I don’t know where he’s bleeding from. I’m screaming, “Medic! Medic!” as I get him behind the rubble again.

  The rest of our squad’s passing us, and he’s patting me, saying, “I’m doing fine, Twitch. I’m doing fine. They just got my arm. I’m doing fine.”

  Sgt. Tamura’s leading the squad across the intersection and the medic’s heading for us and by God I can’t believe we made it but we did, and all I had to do was a bit of running.

  I let out a chuckle and fix his glasses, which were knocked crooked when he got hit. “You’re one crazy motherfucker, Bill.”

  He grins at me. “Yeah, yeah. Stupid kotonk.”

  * * *

  By midafternoon, we’re running outta ammo and there’s jeeps coming in at the edge of town, but half of them are shelled on the way in and don’t make it. Luciana’s in ruins. This little village. Roofs collapsed, rubble falling into the streets, shrapnel flying, shells exploding, guys crying “Medic!”

  Then someone calls in an artillery barrage. We find cover as hundreds of rounds rain on Luciana. The noise is deafening. That sound of breaking rock, wood splitting, rockets exploding, glass showering the chewed-up ground.

  And I’m watching this and I’m rubbing my knuckles, waiting for the barrage to end, waiting for orders to push on, and I’m thinking about Japantown. The Toyo Hotel demolished, all the bay windows on Post Street shattered, Uncle Yas’s tailor shop blown to pieces by a grenade, dummies and sewing needles on the floor, the churches turned into rubble, Katsumoto Co. raided, corpses in the aisles, Yum-yum’s piano in the middle of the street, splintered by shell fragments, its innards showing.

  Then Sgt. Tamura is telling me to move, and I’m back in Italy, I’ve got my rifle and my orders, and by dusk we’re chasing the last resistance out of Luciana and my hands are so black I don’t even remember that part of it’s blood, German blood, Bill’s blood, until I start trying to wash ’em clean again.

  VADA

  JULY 22–AUGUST 15

  We get as far as the road between Livorno and Firenze, which they call Florence, when they pull us back to Vada for hot showers and a couple nights of rest. Me and Kaz even scrounge up some pretty good grub. There’s some ceremonies. The 100th Battalion gets its Distinguished Unit Citation for the job they did at Belvedere. In 2nd Battalion, Mas gets to meet the king of England, who’s in Italy to review the troops or something.

  A couple days in,
Frankie comes over from Item Company to find me. He’s got a butterfly knife, like the old one they took from me back in San Fran.

  “Jeez, Frankie,” I say, flipping the blade open and shut, open and shut, finding the rhythm of it again after over two years, the familiar click click click click of handles coming together. It’s like a little piece of home, right here in my hands. “Where’d you get this?”

  He shrugs and takes a swig of the cognac I liberated from an enemy observation post near the river. “Got it off some dead German.”

  “What’s a dead German doing with a butterfly knife?”

  “Nothing. That’s why I took it.”

  Click click click click.

  “How’re you doing out here?” he asks.

  “You know me.” I grin at him. “Having a ball.”

  He gives me a look. He’s got this mean-looking scar on his chin now from a grenade fragment. “You hear from any of the folks back home?”

  “I write ’em all the time.”

  He wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. “I don’t.”

  In the evenings, we spend a helluva lot of time slinging the bull about all the things we’ve seen and done. Guys talk about the grateful Italian women. Kaz tells the Monteverdi story over and over, embellishing it a little more every time. Sgt. Tamura’s too modest to say anything about his run on Hill 140, so I tell that one and I tell it pretty good. During the day, we even do a bit of training with the replacements to get them ready to go into the field. No one who’s been out there already really wants to go back, but we all laugh about it and say, “Yeah, get us back on the line. We’ll push those Germans outta Italy. Lemme at ’em. I’m ready. Hitler’s got another thing coming. I’m ready. I’m ready. I’m ready.”

  ARNO RIVER

  AUGUST 20–SEPTEMBER 5

  Course we do end up back on the line, on the Arno River, west of Firenze, trying to throw the enemy off-balance. But we’re veterans at this now. We patrol the hedges, we skirmish in the vineyards, our OPs get hit by artillery, our guys by small-arms fire, our guys go to the aid stations, our guys get up again, our guys keep patrolling, skirmishing, fighting. We’re all looking for prisoners ’cause we wanna know what the Germans know, and some of us get lucky and capture some troops from the Panzergrenadiers.